The Start of Everything (31 page)

I wish Mother would have called my mobile. I hate being chained next to the front door, but that’s where the jack is, and the range of the handset is abysmal. And this is the number she calls. She won’t be persuaded. Juliet closed the door behind her; I sat on the floor with my back against it. “Mother, I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Yes! I was so pleased to get your messages. You never call enough. Does this mean you’re coming home for Easter?”

She still looks at life as half-terms and holidays. Being an academic doesn’t make me a schoolboy. “No. I need to know what’s going on. Where is it?”

She paused before she said, “What?” She knew full well what I meant.

She’d kept the watch, all these years. It was her talisman. I can’t be said to have allowed her to keep it; she kept it hidden even from me. I hated it being in the house, but I was more afraid of its potential vulnerability if it was exposed in some rubbish heap or dropped in the Avon. She promised me it would be safe.

“Have you lost it? Is it gone?” I demanded.

She said nothing. Pouting, preening; I didn’t have to see it to know it was there. “You were meant to look after it,” I said darkly.

“I
did
look after it. Don’t you say I didn’t. I was burgled. They broke my back window. I was down the shops. They took the computer and all my jewellery. Your father’s wedding ring.” Father in biological terms only. “They let Roscoe and Tabitha loose.” She’d become a cat lady when the nest emptied. “Roscoe got locked in the neighbour’s garage. He suffered. Don’t you talk about suffering!”

“It was taken? You’re saying it was taken? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“And worry you?” Her voice was wide-eyed.

Damn
. It was the real thing. Tobias had told me it was, but I had hoped he was mistaken.…

“How did you know?” Mother asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Stephen?” she said, in that sly voice that sounds like a naughty child.

She still believed it, or chose to believe it.

I slammed down the receiver. She couldn’t help me now.

It rang. I unplugged it from the jack.

Damn
.

My mobile rang from downstairs.
Well, well … she had the number after all
.

From my low vantage point, I noticed a box by the stairs.

Juliet had picked up a fan heater from B&Q. I chucked it out with the rubbish. I’d told her I won’t have them in the house.

Tobias said the watch had been sent to him while I was in Chile, collecting data from the VLT. Then the term had ended, then Christmas. It had slipped his mind. “Mathilde needed …” he began, and I tuned out.

At first I’d thought he was taunting me, but he was ignorant. He thought it was happy news, that something of my brother’s had been lost and then found. Whoever had stolen Mother’s jewellery had got rid of it in a pawn shop, and a sharp-eyed “Old Boy” had recognised it as one of the school’s annual prize watches. He’d sent it on to Tobias for the close-of-boarding exhibit. Like Tobias, he’d attended decades before Stephen. Before the gentrification of the waterfront and the tourist queues for Brunel’s iron ship. He didn’t appreciate its meaning.

But others in Bristol could. Daisy’s parents were still alive. Alive, and angry. They still checked in from time to time, a reminder that though the police had ruled the fire an accident, they had not. The watch was supposed to have been lost in the fire with Stephen. It had been seen on my wrist at the pub.

Tobias asked if my brother “would have minded” sharing his prize as part of the collection at the close-of-boarding festivities, after which it would be returned to my family. I told him Stephen had been a private person and would have minded very much. I was adamant that he turn the watch over to me.

He “forgot,” repeatedly. I gave him every chance.

I caught up with him at the Institute during Easter break. Not many people were around. He was foraging in the small kitchen that, in term time, was the domain of the tea ladies. If we worked during break, we served ourselves.

“Tobias, so good to run into you.” I forced my tone to be casual.

“George! Have a biscuit. The doctor says I’m not allowed them anymore, so I live vicariously. What was it you wanted?”

“Can we talk in your office?” It was probably in there.

“Mine’s a tip. Yours?”

That’s when I knew. He wasn’t going to give it up willingly.

He walked ahead of me. Papier-mâché planets hung from strings over our heads. We turned a corner at Earth. Down this corridor, ping-pong balls hung in the pattern of the constellation Orion, but were only recognisable when viewed from standing underneath our home planet. Orion’s stars are all different distances from us. As soon as you move from Earth’s viewpoint, the illusion of a human figure is broken. If I leave my door open and look from my chair, it looks more like a snake.

“What can I do for you?” Tobias leaned back in my guest chair.

I remained standing. I closed the door. “My brother’s watch, Tobias. I want it.”

“Oh!” He raised a finger in recognition. “The watch! Yes. It had slipped my mind.”

That’s what he’d claimed, whenever I’d pressed him. He’d promised to bring it with him to dinner, or drop it in my pigeonhole.

“Confession time: I can’t seem to lay my hands on it.” He shrugged.
“I told you: as bad as a rubbish tip. I thought I had all the archives in one box, but …”

He wasn’t meeting my eyes.
Liar
.

“Mattie’s been … 
difficult
lately. Just when I imagine life is going to move forward, it all snaps backwards. I try to be a good father.…”

He rambled. I leaned against the door jamb. I pushed my hair up off my forehead.

“Stop it,” I whispered.

He didn’t hear. “… She won’t see a doctor. I can’t force her. But surely, then, if she defends herself as entirely able she shouldn’t be dependent upon …”

“Stop it!” I said. I did not shout. I merely spoke firmly.

His head snapped up. “Pardon?”

He’d made his decision; that was clear. That box of alumni donations—including my brother’s prize watch, inscribed—was going to go back to Bristol unless I stopped it.

The colour left his face. He pointed a key at me, tip first, arm extended like a fencer. His other hand was splayed over his chest. “George, can you get me my pills?”

All silence except for his breaths. No one else was about.

If it had been term time, the other offices would have been full. There would have been chatter in the common area. But today the quiet was thick around us. In that quiet, a memory stirred:

In Stephen’s kitchen, wiping my hands on that striped towel. I could have tossed it onto the countertop, or table or floor. I wanted to throw something, make an impact, but of course a towel would do nothing. A towel can’t make a sound or knock something over, but that’s all that was in my hand.

I’d dropped it on the heater on purpose. I hadn’t known it would make a fire, but I had hoped. I even kicked the heater nearer to a pile of old magazines. That was my impact; that was my noise. A towel and magazines were all I’d had. I’d done with them what could be done.

I plucked the key from Tobias’s fingers. I exited, shutting the door behind me, and crossed the hall. From here, Orion looked beaked and ducklike.

I unlocked his office. It was, indeed, a tip. I opened drawers. I
checked his jacket, hanging limp from a hook. I pocketed his pill bottle. Alumni correspondence about the Bristol event made a neat stack on the guest chair, but the box of memorabilia was absent. That must have gone elsewhere. Not sent on yet, surely. He was still aggregating it all.

I searched every corner and folder, even between pages. The watch was not there.

I sat in his chair, gave the room a silent once-over.

I closed his door behind me. I returned to my office.

It was his own fault. If the watch had been quickly found, I wouldn’t have taken so long. I would have returned with the pills immediately. As it is, he made himself wait.

He lay diagonally across the chair. He dripped sweat. Nothing of him moved except for a shallow respiration.

I searched his pockets. Tissues, a pen, and a wallet. Nothing else. I sighed and fingered the pill bottle in my pocket. When he stopped breathing I called 999.

“Mattie, I was coming to get you,” I called, running after her. “It’s your father. He’s had another heart attack. He’s been taken to hospital. I should bring you.” This was my chance. The box with the memorabilia had to be in his home office. “We’ll stop by your house first. We can pick up some things for him to …”

She smacked my hand.

I made fists but held them at my sides. I breathed in and out.

I backed down. I waited. I gave her every chance.

CHAPTER 27

CHLOE FROHMANN

M
rs. Bennet’s arrival involves a clatter. I think in her rush she knocked a plant off the steps. She thumps on the pulled-to pocket door, which Ms. Barnes has to struggle to reopen.

“Drusilla! Sweetheart!” says Mrs. Bennet, both hands extended. Dru shrinks back and looks away. Mrs. Bennet lets her hands drop. She turns on me. “What are you saying about my daughter?” she demands.

Ms. Barnes eagerly sets about recapping. Mrs. Bennet stops her with one finger raised.

“I’d like to hear it from you,” she insists of me.

I comply, saying only that we fear Dru may have been assaulted.

She sucks in air. “Someone at the house? Was it that writer?” I keep my face blank. “Dru?” But Dru’s looking down and there’s only hair.

Mrs. Bennet, hands on hips: “On what are you basing this assumption?”

On Mr. Casey not having a TV? Is that really all we have? On it
being a good story that explains why someone might want to kill Grace? On the length and colour of hairs in a hairbrush matching those tangled in the claw of a bloody hammer fifty miles away from the scene of the crime?

Mrs. Bennet sneers at my hesitation. She makes a call. It’s a number she has programmed, so she’s not lodging a complaint about me. Yet.

“Damn.” She tries a different number. “Rory? Please tell Ian I need to speak with him immediately.”

Max has taken a chair in the corner. It’s a leather library chair, much bigger than her. Her legs are tucked underneath her, and her eyes are closed. Her chest rises and falls like the fake breathing of Sleeping Beauty at Madame Tussauds.

“Just tell me. No, I can’t come home just now. You tell me what’s going on.”

The high-pitched wail sounds like a fire alarm. I start to rise to exit the building. But it’s Mrs. Bennet, keening into the phone. “Rory Casey, you lie! You’re a liar!”

What’s going on over there? I itch to get Keene on the phone, but the number I would use is the number Mrs. Bennet’s already speaking on.

“No, I have my car. Yes, I can drive.
Of course
I can drive. We’ll all come home.” Her phone hand drops, and her face falls into the other hand.

“Mum?” says Max, still curled up but eyes open.

Mrs. Bennet calls the girls to her. They join her on the couch, even Dru, one on either side.